While a reporter in Berlin for the Chicago Tribune, he also sent pieces on drama and books to The New York Times. At one point, he was hired in Berlin by Dancer Isadora Duncan, to be her publicist in preparation for her return tour in America. At home again in the U.S., he took a job as a reporter for the New York World. He was known as a "gifted, prodigious Writer," and contributed to Vanity Fair, The Saturday Evening Post and numerous other magazines. While still in his twenties, he collaborated with Heywood Broun, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. Sherwood, and others on a revue, and collaborated with George S. Kaufman on a play, The Good Fellow, and with Marc Connelly on The Wild Man of Borneo. From 1923 to 1926, he was at The New York Times backing up George S. Kaufman in the drama department and soon after became the first regular theatre critic for The New Yorker, writing a weekly column during 1925 and 1926. He was a member of the Algonquin Round Table. His writing attracted the notice of film Producer Walter Wanger who offered him a motion-picture contract and he soon moved to Hollywood.